The recent passing of John Ashbery provided the impetus for this week's final post. Ashbery's death, and those of others I deeply admire, including James Tate and Russell Edson, turned out to disturb me, emotionally, in a way that, quite honestly, took me by surprise. I had never met any of them, and only had the chance to hear Ashbery read once, at the Poetry Project. But their importance to my writing (and reading, and thinking) life were enormous – as, it turns out, was the fact that they were living poets, making new work and continuing to construct their unfinished oeuvres, side by side with the rest of us, in the face of the same technological and cultural paradigm shifts, natural (and political) disasters, etc. As well: that the loss I felt was shared by untold others.
Which led me to wonder about the emotional valence of this question for other writers. How (and why) is it meaningful to them to know that a writer they admire is their living contemporary? How has the loss of such figures affected their attitudes towards the work of those who are still with us – or to their own?
It is my honor to share two moving and thought-provoking responses, by two extraordinary poets.
G.C. Waldrep: On the Deaths of Poets
I’ve never been the sort of person to fetishize poets, their lives or their persons or their things. I’ve visited Amherst, Mass., three times now and never had any desire whatsoever to tour Emily Dickinson’s house. (Edward Gorey’s sly smack in The Willowdale Handcar pretty much sums up that sort of literary tourism to me.) Fetishize their poems, yes: but not their persons, not their possessions. Poets are always and forever in the act of leaving us, poem by poem. Every poem is posthumous, every poem reaches out to the living moment from a past that is no longer directly accessible.
But there comes a moment when there will be no more poems, because the poet has left the room, permanently.
When the news of Czeslaw Milosz’s death came in August 2004, I was at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and I cried. Not because he had died — he was, after all, 93; many people at Bread Loaf seemed unaware he hadn’t already died, years before — but because he had continued to write almost up until that moment: we were still, all of us who cared about his work, caught up in the flow of its becoming. And now, barring hidden, unpublished (or untranslated) manuscripts, there would be no more.
Milosz was not my “first poet”— that would be Robert Penn Warren, whose Selected Poems I was awarded by way of a prize upon my high school graduation in 1986 — but he was my first master, the first poet I consciously placed myself under, longing to understand some fraction of what he understood, which was about time and impermanence, how these relate to the mysteries of the self, and how all of these inscrutables relate to the state, to res publica, the human project of citizenship. For Milosz, other human beings were essentially unknowable to each other. This made the project of the state, of public life, all that more fraught, and all that more necessary.
Death, of course, is the ultimate inscrutability. (Or is that God, or love?) And Milosz took his own essential inscrutability with him. We’re left with the poems.
I understand the desire, for those of us who live through that moment of stoppage, of curtailment, of loss, to — postpone. To reckon with that moment by delaying: for instance, by publishing a poet’s juvenilia or discarded drafts.
There were other poets who shaped my own life and work in those years: of contemporary Americans, Carl Phillips and Brigit Pegeen Kelly foremost. I wrote about Kelly’s death a year ago, here. I’ve wondered whether or how much her literary executors will publish of the work she left behind. She left so much behind, even in life: I remember poems she presented at readings that she later discarded (better: rescinded), and of course the handful that appeared in journals and magazines after The Orchard, such as “Iskandariya,” her scorpion poem. Will there be more work from Kelly? Perhaps. Would she have hated that, guarded against that, the sense of her work now as doubly posthumous? I suspect so. She was her own most demanding curator, always.
As for John Ashbery: in 2002 I found a book of poems by a French poet in translation, one Pierre Martory. Martory had died not long before. I admired the poems, having no idea of Martory’s personal connection to Ashbery. I wrote a poem in homage (because remember, poetry is one way our species has of talking back to the dead, or— Milosz again — poetry as the language intelligible, perhaps, to both the living and the dead). And because the mystery of speaking back to the dead, of how the dead speak back to the living (likewise through poems), seemed essential, I placed that poem as one of the two lead poems in my first collection, Goldbeater’s Skin.
I can’t remember how that collection got into Ashbery’s hands, but a few months later I received a letter from him. By then I lived in an apartment in a tottering Victorian in Iowa City (during the week; on the weekends I lived in the nearby Amish community at Kalona). It was still hard to think of myself as a poet, even though my first collection was out in the world. When I saw the return address on the envelope, my first thought was that someone was pranking me. (Iowa City in 2004 was a prankish place.) But it really was from Ashbery, thanking me for having read and honored Martory’s work.
The beauty of Ashbery, of course, is that he is always multiple, always a sequence of refracted and refracting personae, and yet always and ineluctably himself, in every poem. But here was a different Ashbery, reaching out to a young poet he’d never met on the ground prepared by the poems of another poet he had known intimately.
In that case, in that moment, a letter from the living, to the living. At that time two of the poets were living, and one dead. Now, one of the poets is living, and two are dead.
Another working definition of poetry: a kindness done to strangers. A kindness you had no reason to extend, none at all — beyond the fact of the poem.
This is a false definition, obviously. But imagine the world we would live in, if it were true.
Maureen Seaton: Missing Audre (1988)
It may have been a weeknight that fall of 1988, 7 PM on September 28th or 8 PM on November 16th. It may have happened on the Upper West Side—maybe Columbia. The memory smells a little like academia, not a bookstore or gallery. My lover (we called our lovers lover in those days) and I set out from her apartment on 119th or mine on 104th, and wherever the reading took place, we didn’t find it in time. We ended up in a narrow hallway in a receiving line of women, crushed between two bare walls with a light at one end. The reading was obviously over because everyone buzzed and laughed and we joined in although we hadn’t heard a word or caught a glimpse. Then our hero walked out of the light into the tunnel of women. Strolled right by us, shaking hands, hugging. She may have touched my arm. I may have smiled into her face. My lover may have introduced us. (She’s brave like that.) I don’t know. I don’t think I’ve exhaled the particular caught breath of that night in thirty years.
Memory guides both body and mind in surreal ways, wondrous, but often blurred. I’ve been trying to pay closer attention to the living writers around me, those I know — poets, colleagues, my students, editors, fellow contributors in literary mags — and those I would like to know. I’ve been paying more attention, practicing memory. Lorde spoke of a necessary consciousness, of ending silence, knowing self and speaking from that place of knowing. She said: To whom do I owe the symbols of my survival? (Zami: A New Spelling of My Name). And what I’ve noticed lately, in this heightened time, is that writers are about as noisy as I’ve ever known us to be. My dear angry outspoken amazing contemporaries have become symbols of survival for me, my collaborators-in-peace, my colleagues-in-arms.
When I need guidance about justice or relationships of any kind, personal, political, in regards to gender, race, sex, self, I turn to Audre Lorde. When she died I had yet to fully understand one of my favorite pieces of writing in the English language, her “Uses of the Erotic: the Erotic as Power.” I still don’t, truthfully, not fully — that elusive essay with its poetry and generosity and hope — and I hope I never do.
When I speak of the erotic, then, I speak of it as an assertion of the life-force of women; of that creative energy empowered, the knowledge and use of which we are now reclaiming in our language, our history, our dancing, our loving, our work, our lives. (“Uses of the Erotic: the Erotic as Power”)
I love giving this bomb of an essay to my student writers to see their puzzled smiles as the words start to sink in and bounce through their brains and bodies like pinballs. I love that something so precious to me can shake them up, that, if they choose, it will become bedrock for them as well.
For just four years, 1988-1991, I lived in the same city as my most beloved writer. As a new poet, I took strength from her words that were revolutionary to me then as they still are in 2017. When I read the poetry of my contemporaries now, when I sit down to write myself, I understand that we challenge and transform history as we create. I understand, as Audre Lorde did, that our power is real.
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Some parting thanks: to Maureen Seaton and G.C. Waldrep for spending the time to so deeply and wisely engage my questions. And to David Lehman and Stacey Harwood for giving me the opportunity to add my voice to the amazing others animating this wonderful venue. Finally and especially, to all who have taken the time to visit!
--Susan Lewis
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